For many years, the Penny Arcade Expo has felt like a home-grown, personal meeting of both those who play games and those who make them. Instead of focusing on the pizzazz and AAA titles of E3, PAX has put independent developers in the spotlight in order to give quality projects the ability to break out. However, recent comments concerning sexism, the transgender community, and even rape from Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the founders of PAX’s parent organization Penny Arcade, have made some members of the community feel uneasy. So uneasy, in fact, that a major developer is skipping out on the show entirely.
The Fullbright Company, which is comprised of many of the developers behind BioShock 2’s Minerva’s Den DLC and the still in-development Gone Home, has announced that it will not be presenting its game at the upcoming PAX Prime event. This was noted as a difficult decision, spurred by the Penny Arcade Kickstarter, a strange supporting message for rape culture, and a few other notable blunders.
“This morning we stopped pushing those long-held reservations about Jerry and Mike into the back of our minds,” the studios’ official website reads. “We talked to each other and did a simple show of hands– do any of us feel comfortable presenting Gone Home at PAX? No hands went up.”
To give you an idea of just how bad things have been, the below description for a panel actually appeared on Penny Arcade's website before being highly edited.
Yeah, that's pretty gross. But it doesn't stop there. This was followed by a series of dismissive Tweets concerining the transgender community, posted by Krahulik. Here are a few examples.
It's been a bad stretch of Penny Arcade, and thanks to this recent news, it's only getting worse. There’s plenty of interest around Gone Home, and since it was accepted into the Indie Megabooth, people will be disappointed it won’t be around to play. This is the first solid kickback we’ve seen from developers concerning PAX, but unlikely the last.
